Donor or Patron

[Bertie, Willoughby]

(b Gainsborough, Jan 16, 1740; d Rycote, Sept 26, 1799). English music patron, composer, and political writer. He was educated at Westminster and Oxford (MA 1761) and spent several years in Europe. In Geneva (1765) he met Grétry, who wrote a flute concerto for him based on the improvisations he had played to Grétry to demonstrate his prowess. He spent time in Geneva with the exiled politician John Wilkes and met Voltaire in nearby Ferney. From the mid 1770s he was much involved in the musical and political life of Britain. He was brought into close contact with J.C. Bach and C.F. Abel through his brother-in-law Giovanni Gallini, who was concerned in the organization of the Bach-Abel subscription concerts, which the Earl is said to have subsidized. At his request, Abel composed Four Trios: Two for Two Flutes and a Bass op.16 and J.C. Bach is the author of one of two trios composed for the earl, ‘selected’ and published by Monzani in about ...

(b Atri, 1458; d Conversano, Jan 19, 1529). Italian humanist, patron and theorist. He was a member of the Accademia Pontaniana in Naples and initiated a long-standing tradition of musical culture in the family of the dukes of Atri, who were important patrons; his son Giovanni Antonio Donato was also a lira player. Acquaviva d’Aragona financed the Neapolitan printer Antonio de Frizis and housed the press in his palace in Naples. One of the earliest examples of music printing in the kingdom of Naples was the Motetti libro primo printed by De Frizis in 1519 (it is no longer extant, but a copy was owned by Fernando Colón). In 1526 De Frizis printed Acquaviva d’Aragona’s Latin translation of Plutarch’s De virtute morali, which was followed by an extensive Latin commentary including a 76-page treatise De musica (the whole was reprinted in Frankfurt in 1609). Notable for its wealth of illustrations and for its incorporation into a broader context addressed to humanists in general rather than to a specialized musical readership, the treatise is largely based on the writings of Boethius and Gaffurius, and takes as its point of departure Plutarch’s observations on music’s power of suggestion. The ...

( b Rome, March 31, 1571; d Rome, February 10, 1621). Italian ecclesiastic and patron of music . Nephew of Pope Clement VIII, who created him cardinal in 1593, he acquired a leading role in the papal court by negotiating the reversion of the Duchy of Ferrara to the papacy (1598) and a treaty between France and Savoy over the disputed marquisate of Saluzzo (1601). Until his uncle’s death (1605), he was among Rome’s most influential patrons of music and art; among the composers who dedicated publications to him were Palestrina, Monte, Cavalieri and Luzzaschi, and his protégés included both members of the papal chapel (e.g. Felice Anerio, Ruggiero Giovanelli and Girolamo Rosini) and instrumentalists from the disbanded Ferrarese establishment (the Piccinini brothers and Rinaldo Dall’Arpa). Pietro’s influence declined during the pontificate of Paul V; the last great beneficiary of his patronage was Frescobaldi, who dedicated to him the ...

(b ?Medina del Campo, 1394; ruled 1416–58; d Naples, June 27, 1458). Spanish monarch and patron. He was the son of Fernando I of Antequera and Leonor of Albuquerque. His activity as patron is usually divided into two periods, before and after he had settled in Naples (1433). He was an outstanding patron of minstrels, among them the shawm player Jehan Boisard and the lutenist Rodrigo de la Guitarra. The choir of his royal chapel was, according to his contemporaries, one of the finest of its day. In the two earliest records of its members, dating from 1413 and 1417, there are 13 singers, among them Gacian Reyneau and Leonart Tallender, and two organists. His singers were recruited from Spain, France and Germany: in October 1419 he sent one of them, Huguet lo Franch, to his native land in search of singers, providing him with a letter offering all kinds of privileges. In ...

(b Alsager, Cheshire, Sept 27, 1779; d London, Nov 15, 1846). English music critic and patron. He was proprietor of and writer for The Times, an association formed in 1817 through his friendship with Thomas Barnes. Alsager reported on financial matters and foreign news, but evidence reveals that both he and Barnes wrote most of the articles on theatre and music in The Times before the appointment in 1846, at Alsager's recommendation, of J.W. Davison as the first full-time music critic on a daily newspaper. Alsager was intimate with Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt and Keats, while his passion for music led to friendships with many important figures in London musical life, including Mendelssohn, Spohr, Smart, Moscheles and Ayrton (whose son married Alsager's daughter). Several English premières took place at Alsager's residence, most notably that of Beethoven's Missa solemnis on 24 December 1832. Alsager's desire to proselytize for Beethoven's piano sonatas and quartets, especially the late works, led to the establishment of the Queen Square Select Society (...

(b Berlin, Nov 9, 1723; d Berlin, March 30, 1787). German patron, amateur musician and composer. The youngest sister of Frederick the Great, she seems to have sought and received his advice on musical matters. A music exercise book, dated 1735, which she shared with her sister Luise Ulrike, indicates an early commitment to musical studies, but it is not certain precisely when Amalia’s formal musical training began. By 1740 she and Ulrike were receiving regular instruction from the cathedral organist, Gottfried Hayne (1684–1758), and this continued until 1742. Amalia apparently reached a high level of accomplishment as a player of stringed keyboard instruments and in about 1755 began to devote herself enthusiastically to playing the organ. Although contemporary reports, including her own letters, suggest that she also played the lute, the violin and the flute, they indicate that she was far less proficient on those instruments....

(b Wolfenbüttel, Oct 24, 1739; d Weimar, April 10, 1807). German amateur musician and patron. She was the daughter of Duke Karl I of Brunswick and a niece of Frederick the Great. As a child she was given a good musical education. At the age of 16 she married the 18-year-old Duke Ernst August Konstantin of Saxe-Weimar; after his death two years later until the accession of her eldest son Duke Karl August on 3 September 1775 she conducted the regency. Despite her heavy official responsibilities she cultivated intellectual interests, especially music. She continued to take lessons in composition and keyboard playing from the leading musician in Weimar at that time, Ernst Wilhelm Wolf (later the court Kapellmeister), and gathered round her a group of scholars, poets and musicians, professional and amateur, which was a lively centre of discussion and music-making. In this ‘court of the muses’, as Wilhelm Bode called it, whose members included Wieland, Herder and eventually Goethe, Anna Amalia herself played a significant part in bringing together the poetry of ‘Weimar Classicism’ and the music of the time. J.A. Hiller's most successful Singspiel, ...

[Maria Antonia Josefa Johanna ]

(b Vienna, Nov 2, 1755; d Paris, Oct 16, 1793). Queen of France and patron of opera . The daughter of Emperor Franz I of Austria, she received her early tuition from Gluck (clavecin and singing) and Noverre (dance and deportment). As dauphine (1770) and later queen of France (1774), she supported a great many artists working within the field of opera. The success of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide at the Opéra in 1774 was due largely to the presence of the entire court at the première and to the dauphine’s enthusiastic applause for individual numbers. Accused of favouring Austrian interests too overtly, she was obliged to welcome Piccinni to Paris, and later favoured Sacchini until further criticism forced her to support native composers: for celebrations at Fontainebleau in 1786 Lemoyne’s Phèdre was staged in preference to Sacchini’s Oedipe à Colone. Works by Grétry (...

[Ennal, Charles-Ernest]

(b Fockenhof, Kurland, Feb 14, 1722; d Paris, March 24, 1791). French dilettante, amateur violinist and composer, patron of the arts and instrument collector. A magnificent and very wealthy nobleman, he both amused and astounded his contemporaries. M. Audinot in his comic opera La musicomanie (1779), and possibly E.T.A. Hoffmann in his tale Die Serapionsbrüder (1819), attempted to evoke his strange personality, emphasizing its ridiculous nature.

At the death of his father, a landed nobleman, in 1747, Bagge inherited a large fortune which enabled him to study the violin in Italy with Tartini. By 1750 he had settled in Paris; in the following year he was awarded the title chambellan du Roi de Prusse (then Frederick II) and married the daughter of the Swiss banker Jacob Maudry. With Maudry's death in 1762 the very large inheritance proved a source of contention to the ill-matched couple and they soon separated. Bagge later attempted to gain possession of the inheritance of Mme Maudry, who had died in ...

(Ray )

(b Lewiston, IL, May 26, 1886; d San Diego, Aug 28, 1975). American composer, teacher and patron. She studied with Rudolf Ganz and Felix Borowski at the Chicago Musical College (BM 1906) and with Heniot Levy and Adolf Weidig at the American Conservatory, Chicago; she also studied composition in Chicago with Wilhelm Middleschulte and in Berlin with Hugo Kaun (1909–10). From 1917 to 1926 she taught music at the San Diego High School. A respected and influential leader of musical life in San Diego, she helped to found the San Diego Opera Guild and the San Diego Civic SO (of which she was chairwoman for 14 years). Barnett wrote some 60 art songs, 49 of which were published by G. Schirmer and Summy between 1906 and 1932. They display a lyrical gift, sure tonal sense and, despite her German training, strong French harmonic influence. They are often exotic and colourful, especially ...

(b Fonthill, Sept 29, 1760; d Bath, May 2, 1844). English writer, patron and amateur composer. He is chiefly remembered as author of the oriental tale Vathek (1786). Although he was an accomplished performer on the harpsichord and pianoforte, it is unlikely that, as he later claimed, Beckford studied with Mozart when both were children. Beckford met Pacchierotti in Italy in 1780; he encouraged the castrato to return to England to sing at the Italian opera and became one of his most important patrons. For Beckford’s coming-of-age party at his Fonthill estate the following year a cantata (Il tributo) composed by Rauzzini was performed by the composer together with Pacchierotti and Tenducci. Beckford provided music for Elizabeth, Lady Craven’s opera The Arcadian Pastoral (1782), which was written for private performance at Queensberry House in London; his other compositions include an Overture du Ballet de Phaeton...

(b Verona, Oct 8, 1536; d Verona, Aug 1, 1593). Italian patron of music. He was a member of the nobility. He graduated in law at Bologna in 1567, and on returning to Verona he entered the Accademia Filarmonica in 1568. He was an important member of the city government but his main interests lay in the arts and culture. In the Palazzo Bevilacqua, built by Sanmicheli in about 1535, he created a museum of Greco-Roman antiquities, a picture gallery, a library and the famous ridotto. Among the salaried musicians of the ridotto were Sebastiano Pigna, Paolo Masnelli, Ercole Pasquini and Domenico Lauro. Stefano Bernardi also probably served there as a boy chorister. Pietro Pontio's dialogue Ragionamento di musica (1588) is dedicated to Bevilacqua and is set in the ridotto, which the author described as a place where ‘almost daily, many gentlemen gather and exercise themselves in virtuous things such as playing and singing and discussions of similar topics’. Many composers, including Lassus, Marenzio, Leoni, Orazio Vecchi, Claudio Merulo, Philippe de Monte, Girolamo della Casa, Massaino, Gabriele Martinengo, Filippo Nicoletti and Maddalena Casulana also dedicated their works to Bevilacqua. On ...

(b Boston, MA, Aug 6, 1876; d Philadelphia, PA, Jan 4, 1970). American writer and music patron. She was the only child of columnist Louisa Knapp Curtis and publisher Cyrus H.K. Curtis, the founder of Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, as well as a major Philadelphia philanthropist. She married the Dutch-born Pulitzer Prize-winning author and editor, Edward William Bok, when she was 19.

She became an active supporter of the Settlement Music School (est. 1906) and provided $150,000 to establish its home on Queen Street in Philadelphia in 1917. In 1924, she purchased three mansions on Rittenhouse Square to create the Curtis Institute of Music in honor of her father and provided an unprecedented $12.5 million endowment. With artistic guidance from Josef Hofmann and Leopold Stokowski, she assembled a faculty of world-class performers, tapped former Symphony Club conductor Johann Grolle as its first director, and established a tuition-free, merit-based admission standard. She served on the board of the Philadelphia Orchestra until Stokowski’s departure, sponsored Sunday evening chamber concerts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that featured Curtis students, and served as board chairman to the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company from ...

(b Arona, Oct 2, 1538; d Milan, Nov 3, 1584). Italian ecclesiastic. His career as churchman was spectacular. Born into a well-established Milanese family, he took a degree in theology and law at Padua in 1559. When his uncle Giovanni Angelo de' Medici (of the Milanese Medici family, not the Florentine) was elected Pope Pius IV in December 1559, the young Borromeo rose swiftly to high office. In January 1560 he was made papal secretary of state and cardinal; the next month he was appointed Archbishop of Milan. Within two years he proved himself an exceptional statesman, reviving the moribund Council of Trent and guiding it to a successful conclusion in 1563, 18 years after its beginnings. From 1560 to 1565, while at Rome, he was the foremost figure in the papal government after the pope. In 1610 he was canonized.

There is ample evidence of Borromeo's interest in sacred music. In ...

(b St Cloud, Aug 2, 1674; d Versailles, Dec 2, 1723). French patron and musician . He was Duke of Chartres and (after the death of his father in 1701) Duke of Orléans, and from 1715 Regent of France. A nephew of Louis XIV, he grew up in Paris and played the flute, guitar, harpsichord and viol. He studied music with Etienne Loulié and composition with Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Nicolas Bernier and Charles-Hubert Gervais, his lifelong valet whom he appointed intendant of his music in 1700. He was keenly interested in Italian music and employed both French and Italian musicians. His earliest known work was an opera, Philomèle, written in collaboration with Charpentier in 1694 and played three times in his residence, the Palais Royal. The duke forbade its publication and it is lost. Helped by Gervais, he composed Penthée, an opera which was probably rehearsed on 21 October 1703...

[Bettine, Elisabeth]

(b Frankfurt, April 4, 1785; d Berlin, Jan 20, 1859). German writer, editor, publisher, composer, singer, visual artist and patron of young artists. Although known today primarily for her writing and her illustrious associates, Bettine was also a talented musician. She composed songs in a simple folk style, choosing texts by poets she knew and loved, including Goethe, Achim von Armin, and her brother, Clemens Brentano. She helped gather songs for Armin and Brentano’s influential collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–8) and decades later published a fourth volume based on their notes (ed. Ludwig Erk, 1854). From 1808 to 1809 she studied singing and composition with Peter von Winter and the piano with Sebastian Bopp in Munich. Her first two songs appeared under the pseudonym ‘Beans Beor’ (‘blessing I am blessed’) with Arnim’s literary works. After her crucial meeting with Beethoven in Vienna (May, 1810), she mediated between him and Goethe....

(b Rushden, Northants., Jan 14, 1644; d London, Sept 27, 1714). English patron of music and amateur musician. He served a seven-year apprenticeship with a London coal dealer and, after returning to Northamptonshire for a while, set up in business in London, where by 1677 he was dealing in small-coal in Aylesbury Street, Clerkenwell. He amassed a large collection of books, from which he acquired a wide knowledge of chemistry, astrology and both theoretical and practical music. In 1678, according to Hawkins, he established with the encouragement of Sir Roger L'Estrange the music meetings which were held every Thursday in a long narrow room over his shop. It was approached by stairs outside the house and was lit by a window ‘no bigger than the bung-hole of a cask’ according to an entertaining account by his neighbour Ned Ward.

Despite their mean surroundings the meetings were attended by such leaders of fashion as the Duchess of Queensberry. The performers included professionals like John Banister (ii) and Philip Hart and, in Britton's later years, Handel, Pepusch (who wrote a trio sonata entitled ‘smalcoal’) and Matthew Dubourg. Britton and L'Estrange played the viola da gamba, and other amateurs included Henry Needler, the poet John Hughes and the painter Woolaston. At first the concerts were free, Britton providing his guests with coffee at a penny a dish; later the visitors apparently paid ten shillings a year each, though the Yorkshire diarist Ralph Thoresby paid nothing when he attended a meeting in ...

(b Wiederau, Saxony, Dec 20, 1736; d London, June 9, 1809). German musical dilettante. He is sometimes designated ‘of Martinskirche’ to distinguish him from his cousin Hans Moritz ‘of Seifersdorf’. He was a nephew of the famous minister Count Heinrich Brühl and the son of Count Friedrich Wilhelm Brühl, and served in diplomatic posts in Paris and Warsaw before becoming Saxon ambassador to London in 1764. The count’s marriage (1767) to Lady Egremont, an attendant at the English court, placed him in association with the queen’s retinue of German musicians. He became the patron of, among others, C.F. Horn and the pianist J.S. Schroeter, who dedicated to him his op.1. Clementi’s sonatas op.13 were dedicated to Brühl and Haydn’s canons on the Ten Commandments (hXXVIIa: 1–10) written for him. Brühl himself published a set of six sonatas for piano with violin accompaniment op.1 (...

[Fane, John; later 11th Earl of Westmorland]

(b London, Feb 3, 1784; d Wansford, Northants., Oct 16, 1859). English amateur musician. He was the eldest son of the 10th Earl of Westmorland, a Tory politician, and was educated at Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge (MA 1808), where he studied music under Charles Hague. His career was political, military and diplomatic. He was MP for Lyme Regis (1806–16). From 1803 to 1815 he served in various campaigns in the Napoleonic wars, at one time as aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington (his wife’s uncle). He became a privy councillor in 1822, a major-general in 1825, lieutenant-general in 1838 and full general in 1854. He was British envoy at Florence from 1814 to 1830, resident minister at Berlin from 1841 to 1851 (acting as mediator between Prussia and Denmark in the Schleswig-Holstein dispute), and ambassador to the imperial court at Vienna from 1851 to 1855...

(b Stuttgart, Feb 11, 1728; d ?Stuttgart, 1793). German patron of music. Educated at the court of Frederick the Great, the young duke began his reign in 1744, emulating the Potsdam court at his own residence in Stuttgart. The court theatre was rebuilt in 1750, and in November 1753 Jommelli was appointed Ober-Kapellmeister. For the next 16 years he wrote and supervised virtually all operas at the court, and during that time assembled one of the best orchestras in Europe. Carl Eugen authorized extensive renovations to the court theatre in Stuttgart between 1756 and 1758, and after being forced to move to Ludwigsburg he built a new Schlosstheater (1765–6). His tastes in opera favoured French-inspired spectacle and dance; Noverre served as his ballet-master from 1760 until 1767, when a mounting deficit forced drastic reductions in personnel. Jommelli left two years later, after the departure of a number of singers including the castrato Giuseppe Aprile. Sacchini was engaged to write an opera in ...